- Whodunit?--Violence and the Myth of Fingerprints: Comment on Harding
There is an irony in the use of fingerprints as a metaphor in two recent essays offering critical locations of scientific practice. In her essay in this issue, Sandra Harding invokes postcolonial critique to look for “cultural fingerprints” as forensic proof of science’s multicultural lineage and as a challenge to any internalist/externalist splittings of its substance. In “Galton’s Regret and DNA Typing,” Paul Rabinow recalls the frustrated hopes of eugenics founder Sir Francis Galton that human fingerprints could serve as markers, not only of individuals, but of races and temperaments. 1 Rabinow cites Galton in part to suggest that contemporary technologies of “DNA fingerprinting” are being constructed and mobilized around a set of assumptions and expectations about essentialized ethnic identity that are reminiscent of Galton’s search for indelible traces of racial difference. In Rabinow’s text the late modern search for fingerprints is more overtly ominous than in Harding’s; in both, fingerprinting evokes an effort to locate difference perhaps too persuasively, and indelibly.
Harding’s project—writing against the simultaneous construction of science as universal and yet antithetical to “non-Western” rationalities—is of obvious and critical import. Her essay introduces readers unfamiliar with one or more lines of critique to a diverse and often powerful set of analyses, and my criticisms are offered [End Page 343] with this recognition. But the coincident language of fingerprints at the outset should alert one to a danger in Harding’s offering of putative multiculturalism as an adequate response to what Shiv Visvanathan, one of the “postcolonial” critics of science invoked, has called the scientific imperatives of vivisection and triage. 2 Rabinow notes, as a sequela of DNA typing: “The post-modern celebration of difference will combine with a social technology it has not been waiting for as well as a set of referents humanities professors may not have been looking for.” 3
Rabinow is not, like Christopher Norris and other malcontents, equating some postmodern straw man with a causal chain leading down the road to neofascism; rather, he juxtaposes the postmodern end to metanarrative with an ever more trenchant and totalizing modernism, imploded in Donna Haraway’s sense onto the gene. 4 The result is something akin to what Fredric Jameson noted as an “ever more rapid alternation” between modern and postmodern critique. 5 This rapidity bespeaks new and ever more diffuse articulations of science as logos, an epistemic era in which distinctions between centripetal and centrifugal pulls of discourse become increasingly meaningless, and multicultural heteroglossia is little guarantee of anything save the capillary-thin bars of Michel Foucault’s version of the iron cage. The search for cultural fingerprints, unintentionally invoking Galton’s regret, suggests a more insidious relationship between science’s multiculturalism and the organization and maintenance of bio-power.
Many of the postcolonial critics Harding cites are Indian, a generation of scholars galvanized into rethinking questions of practice, rationality, and corporeality after the devastation of Bhopal and its ongoing aftermath. But their vision is less one of plurality and transnationalism than of violence and radical recombination. Bhopal shifted the frame of reference for many postcolonial critics of universal science: thus, for example, the tropaic shift from the playful nostalgia of Ashis Nandy in his 1980 Alternative Sciences to the Luddite seriousness of most of the contributors to Nandy’s edited [End Page 344] volume eight years later, Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity. 6 At stake in the earlier text is the relationship of a well-demarcated colonialism to a domesticated bourgeois body; by the second, post-Bhopal, text, the bodies that matter have shifted, and the psychic violence to the postcolonial intellectual has been encompassed by a far more totalizing vivisection.
The violence of this genre barely ruffles the surface of Harding’s text. The invocation of “postcolonial critique” thus appears more performance than engagement. The problem may lie in the question. “Is Science Multicultural?” may not be a central dilemma for many of the authors cited and may in part miss the point: for a cyborg science to be constructed or reclaimed, the still-seamless body of...